Officials hoping to build a whitewater park in Palisade will arrange boulders in the river in the same shapes used upstream at the Price-Stubb Dam if they win approval for the project.

The completion of the $12.1 million diversion, a 900-foot rock channel that bypasses an 8-foot-high concrete dam that formerly diverted water into the Price-Stubb ditch, removes the last obstacle in the upstream passage for native fish in a 290-mile span of the Colorado River from Lake Powell to Rifle.

Without a name tag hanging on each fish, biologists are reluctant to say exactly how many endangered fish swim in the Colorado River. But research indicates populations of the four endangered fish species — the Colorado pikeminnow, the humpback chub, the razorback sucker and the bonytail chub — are stable or increasing.

The fish ladder near the Price-Stubb Diversion Dam is finished. The $10.2 million fish ladder is submerged when Colorado River waters run high.

Four types of endangered Colorado River fish can now get past a western Colorado dam through a just-completed bypass. The 900-foot-long passage, made of 190 concrete cylinders, lets humpback chubs, bonytails, Colorado pikeminnows and razorback suckers get past the Price-Stubb Diversion Dam near the town of Palisade.

At least two endangered fish species will gain access today to the highest reaches of the range, locked off for the past century by the Price-Stubb Dam. Chocolate-brown water from the Colorado River on Thursday morning trickled down the fresh gray concrete of the fish passage at the mouth of De Beque Canyon.

Endangered fish that for nearly a century have been kept from swimming up the Colorado River by an 8-foot high irrigation dam will soon get relief in the form of a $10 million fish passage. U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials said the Price-Stubb Dam, which was built in 1911, will have a notch cut into it by year's end to allow construction of a 600-foot-long channel.

The U.S.